Jenni Frazer

It may go down in diplomatic history as one of the swiftest love affairs on record. Sherard Cowper-Coles was Britain’s ambassador to Israel for just 22 months before he was whipped off to the most improbable successor appointment — as the UK’s man in Saudi Arabia.

Edward Sloman's delicious 1925 morality tale, made for Universal Studios, is a silent movie of the kind that must have launched the phrase "they don't make them like that any more." Rudolph Schildkraut, a renowned actor who had his own Jewish theatre in the Bronx, plays David Cominsky, a Jewish pedlar with a reverence for learning and not much ability to make money.

Maya Kenig's scratchy father and daughter comedy (and that's a bit of a push) is set in the opening days of the Lebanon war of 2006 and features a feckless Shaul, played with disturbing accuracy by Gur Bentvich, and his confused 13-year-old daughter Libby, played by Elya Inbar.

Britain's ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, returned today from a spontaneous visit to Kiryat Malachi, where three Israelis were killed by Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza, pledging solidarity with the people of southern Israel.

After Scandinavian noir and Finnish noir, we now have Polish noir. Or, should I say, Polish-Jewish noir.
For Zygmunt Miloszewski’s terrific A Grain of Truth (Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99) examines the fraught relations between Poles and Jews, 70 years after the country’s Jews were destroyed by the Holocaust.

So, finally, the first fruit of the long-awaited Israel-British film co-production treaty has reached the UK. Zaytoun, a kind of improbable step-bromance-cum-road movie, between a shot-down Israeli air force pilot and a Palestinian child refugee, was one of the opening gala films at this year's UKJFF and received a rapturous audience reception.

A controversial poll suggesting that Israeli Jews would “support apartheid” if the West Bank were annexedhas been strongly criticised.

The poll, whose results were reported in Ha’aretz on Monday, was commissioned by the Yisraela Goldblum Fund, an independent family foundation in the name of the former senior news editor of Kol Israel, who died in 2006.

One word for this 99-minute archive documentary chronicling the life and times of the writer and musician Serge Gainsbourg - smoking.

Narrated by the late, great (or should that be grate?) enfant terrible of the French avant-garde, this film, much of which is previously unseen footage, seems entirely viewed through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Everyone remembers the agony of school friendships. You like someone, they don't like you, you don't know the reason; your best friend is suddenly no longer your best friend; girls huddle in corners, whispering, and lockers are interfered with.

Joachim Fest was a renowned German historian and publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, who wrote award-winning biographies of Hitler and Albert Speer. Born in Berlin in 1926, he died in 2006 and had the perfect ringside seat to chronicle the rise of Nazism.

It is the image familiar to tourists and Israelis alike, the face of the father of modern Zionism that appears on mugs, tea-towels and every other flat surface imaginable.

Few people’s casual holiday snaps have become as famous as the picture of Theodor Herzl taken in Basel, gazing idly into the horizon as he leaned over the balcony of his hotel room, overlooking the Rhine river.

Ten years after he came down from his mountain-top Buddhist monastery, Leonard Cohen embarked, for financial reasons, on a series of concert tours whose astonishing success must have exceeded even his wildest expectations. From Tel Aviv to Tokyo, he plundered his back catalogue and played to ecstatic critics and audiences.

One event we are guaranteed not to see: the families of superstar violinist Itzhak Perlman and that of the equally starry cantor, Yitzchak Helfgot, on stage together.

For despite the free-flowing musicality that runs through both families — four of Perlman’s five children are professional musicians — neither man seems disposed to have their children follow directly in their footsteps.